Attacking Earth

StealthSeeker wrote:my idea on attacking Earth was that the GA would have a hard time getting the people of the SL not to get all indigent about it if the GA just attacked. However, if the GA attacked with Beowulf in response to what seems to be an inevitable attack on Beowulf by the SLN, there might be a great deal of grudging understanding as to why it happened. Not that they would like it, but they may not be able to believe in themselves as innocent or undeserving of an attack if it was done is response to an attack on Beowulf by the SLN.

A second strategy might be that rather than destroying civilian infrastructure they just attacked military infrastructure and then left, rather than trying to force a surrender followed by an occupation. The destruction of all things military could be justified by Beowulf as an act of reprisal and defense rather than an unreasonable attack.

one tactic I like is to send a task force to each of the half dozen planets that have mothballed reserve fleets and destroy those empty hulls before any of them can be brought back into service in support of the SLN commerce raiding plan. To save on torpedoes, I would lure the main defense out to meet a "visible" attack force while a bunch of LAC's "ghost" through and use their grazers to destroy the inactive, unoccupied and unarmed ships.

But, as I say, the attack on Beowulf has to occur first to provide justification.

There's no point in destroying the Reserve. Actually
trying to reactivate it would break the SLN, and the League.
Nothing in it has any meaningful combat value, much of it is old and obsolete, even by the standards of the SLN, no real maintenance has been performed, and there's jack all for crew.
It would be cheaper and faster to design and build an entire new fleet than to reactivate the SLN Reserve. You'd almost certainly end up with better ships if you started from scratch, too.

Kytheros wrote:There's no point in destroying the Reserve. Actually
trying to reactivate it would break the SLN, and the League.
Nothing in it has any meaningful combat value, much of it is old and obsolete, even by the standards of the SLN, no real maintenance has been performed, and there's jack all for crew.
It would be cheaper and faster to design and build an entire new fleet than to reactivate the SLN Reserve. You'd almost certainly end up with better ships if you started from scratch, too.

Yeah, the SLN reserve is sort of a millstone around its neck. At the moment, there's probably lots of political types running around calling for its reactivation because some waller must surely be better than no waller. Destroying it would just drive home the need for new construction; as long as the reserve is still a thing, the temptation to throw good money after bad will still be present.

The E wrote:

Kytheros wrote:There's no point in destroying the Reserve. Actually
trying to reactivate it would break the SLN, and the League.
Nothing in it has any meaningful combat value, much of it is old and obsolete, even by the standards of the SLN, no real maintenance has been performed, and there's jack all for crew.
It would be cheaper and faster to design and build an entire new fleet than to reactivate the SLN Reserve. You'd almost certainly end up with better ships if you started from scratch, too.

Yeah, the SLN reserve is sort of a millstone around its neck. At the moment, there's probably lots of political types running around calling for its reactivation because some waller must surely be better than no waller. Destroying it would just drive home the need for new construction; as long as the reserve is still a thing, the temptation to throw good money after bad will still be present.

Plus, while the Reserve exists, the SLN needs to allocate resources to keeping it secure - they might be recognizing that the Reserve is useless against Manticore, but they really don't want anybody else walking off with any SDs either.

The E wrote:

Kytheros wrote:There's no point in destroying the Reserve. Actually
trying to reactivate it would break the SLN, and the League.
Nothing in it has any meaningful combat value, much of it is old and obsolete, even by the standards of the SLN, no real maintenance has been performed, and there's jack all for crew.
It would be cheaper and faster to design and build an entire new fleet than to reactivate the SLN Reserve. You'd almost certainly end up with better ships if you started from scratch, too.

Yeah, the SLN reserve is sort of a millstone around its neck. At the moment, there's probably lots of political types running around calling for its reactivation because some waller must surely be better than no waller. Destroying it would just drive home the need for new construction; as long as the reserve is still a thing, the temptation to throw good money after bad will still be present.

Destroying it would also let those who should have been responsible for keeping the Reserve a useful tool hide the fact that they utterly failed in their duty.

But while it exists it will be harder for the SLN and the Mandarins to get extra money to build a new fleet. If they go begging to the Assembly for war emergency funding they're inevitably going to get bogged down in hearings on why the Reserve isn't useful, why all this money was sunk on expensive ships that you now say are worthless, why weren't there plans to crew the vast number of ships sitting there moldering away, etc, etc, etc.

Odds are they'll be forced to waste money and resources activating some of them just to get politicians off their backs.

But blow them away and all those questions disappear along with the dissipating plasma that was the Reserve; and the rush of anger can be harnessed to squeeze out war emergency funding from League members - mitigating (to some degree) the massive loss of SLN earmarked funding due to disruption of trade and wormholes.


It's hard to see a likely upside to the GA to blow those away. Yeah, there's a chance in a thousand that demonstrating you can roll through any defenses and blow them up might cause sanity to break out on the Solarian side and cause them to seek a ceasefire. But even in that unlikely scenario I don't think is a win because it leaves the GA in the risky position that the League hasn't broken up; so if they come back to avenge that insult in 25 years or so they'll probably have sufficiently redressed the tech imbalance and be able to roll over Manticore...

I say leave it along to act as that millstone around their necks.

Kytheros wrote:There's no point in destroying the Reserve. Actually
trying to reactivate it would break the SLN, and the League.
Nothing in it has any meaningful combat value, much of it is old and obsolete, even by the standards of the SLN, no real maintenance has been performed, and there's jack all for crew.
It would be cheaper and faster to design and build an entire new fleet than to reactivate the SLN Reserve. You'd almost certainly end up with better ships if you started from scratch, too.

The E wrote:
Yeah, the SLN reserve is sort of a millstone around its neck. At the moment, there's probably lots of political types running around calling for its reactivation because some waller must surely be better than no waller. Destroying it would just drive home the need for new construction; as long as the reserve is still a thing, the temptation to throw good money after bad will still be present.

Jonathan_S wrote:Destroying it would also let those who should have been responsible for keeping the Reserve a useful tool hide the fact that they utterly failed in their duty.

But while it exists it will be harder for the SLN and the Mandarins to get extra money to build a new fleet. If they go begging to the Assembly for war emergency funding they're inevitably going to get bogged down in hearings on why the Reserve isn't useful, why all this money was sunk on expensive ships that you now say are worthless, why weren't there plans to crew the vast number of ships sitting there moldering away, etc, etc, etc.

Odds are they'll be forced to waste money and resources activating some of them just to get politicians off their backs.

But blow them away and all those questions disappear along with the dissipating plasma that was the Reserve; and the rush of anger can be harnessed to squeeze out war emergency funding from League members - mitigating (to some degree) the massive loss of SLN earmarked funding due to disruption of trade and wormholes.


It's hard to see a likely upside to the GA to blow those away. Yeah, there's a chance in a thousand that demonstrating you can roll through any defenses and blow them up might cause sanity to break out on the Solarian side and cause them to seek a ceasefire. But even in that unlikely scenario I don't think is a win because it leaves the GA in the risky position that the League hasn't broken up; so if they come back to avenge that insult in 25 years or so they'll probably have sufficiently redressed the tech imbalance and be able to roll over Manticore...

I say leave it along to act as that millstone around their necks.

Actually, there is a use the SL could get out of the reserve: auction them off to the highest bidder. There are a lot of would-be empire-builders out there who would just love a wing of old ISLN super-dreadnaughts when their neighbors have nothing comparable.

Will the MAlign mole think of that to suggest?

JohnRoth wrote:Actually, there is a use the SL could get out of the reserve: auction them off to the highest bidder. There are a lot of would-be empire-builders out there who would just love a wing of old ISLN super-dreadnaughts when their neighbors have nothing comparable.

Will the MAlign mole think of that to suggest?

No, because it's a really obvious way for local independence groups to gain more traction. The Mandarin's overriding goal is to preserve the League against separatists like Beowulf (or Maya, for example); handing out capital ships to other polities is probably not advisable under those circumstances.

You all know how currupt the solarian officers are. I think a lot of officers would be glad, if no one would ever Access one of the old reserve ships. I think the officers who have to observe the reseve had a better use for the Money of the navy that should be used to Keep the reserve in a Basic condition, means Service every 5 years or so. If someone Comes from outside and finds out, that no one had Access one of the ships for decades...., could be an political earthquke in the current Situation.

Rincewind wrote:... certainly but the principle applied. Most of the systems that would rally to the Mandarins would do so anyway even if the Grand Alliance doesn't attack Earth.

It's not a matter of the planets that would rally anyway, or the ones that wouldn't anyway, both cases (as in most political situations) are a small minority of the overall. It's about the huge majority of planets that are on the fence, or just don't care. Some of those lean more one way, some more the other and a few are just dead-center/don't care. When something like that happens, it causes a paradigm shift, even a minor one can cause a few of those 'mostly-middle-of-the-road-kind-of-in-favor' neutrals to fall over into the 'in-favor' group, and each of those can drag more in, then the 'dead-center/don't-care' group shift to the 'kind-of-in-favor' and with the on-rush of support they just snowball into showing support and the other 'middle-of-the-road-but-not-really' group turn into the 'well-fine-if-every-one-else-is' group and that can force the 'don't-support' group into the 'well-we-don't-want-left-out' group.

The E wrote:

JohnRoth wrote:Actually, there is a use the SL could get out of the reserve: auction them off to the highest bidder. There are a lot of would-be empire-builders out there who would just love a wing of old ISLN super-dreadnaughts when their neighbors have nothing comparable.

Will the MAlign mole think of that to suggest?

No, because it's a really obvious way for local independence groups to gain more traction. The Mandarin's overriding goal is to preserve the League against separatists like Beowulf (or Maya, for example); handing out capital ships to other polities is probably not advisable under those circumstances.

Actually, having a wing of old SL super-dreadnaughts is likely to be more of a white elephant than an actual empire-building mechanism. It ought to up the anxiety quotient a lot, rather than allowing a few empire-building types to actually build their empires.

And if some of them manage to actually make the SDs work, there are always the Lenny Det SDs to make sure they suffer strange accidents.

JohnRoth wrote:Actually, having a wing of old SL super-dreadnaughts is likely to be more of a white elephant than an actual empire-building mechanism. It ought to up the anxiety quotient a lot, rather than allowing a few empire-building types to actually build their empires.

And if some of them manage to actually make the SDs work, there are always the Lenny Det SDs to make sure they suffer strange accidents.

I totally agree that this is a desirable outcome from the MAlign's perspective, I'm just saying that it's unlikely the Mandarins would go for it given their desire to have the SL and the SLN remain the preeminent force in the galaxy.